The Glasgow Necropolis : theft, bribery and drunken gate keepers in a city of the dead

Wun Fung Chan is a geographer working at the University of Strathclyde. On visiting Glasgow City Archives he came across nine Necropolis Committee books containing some lively insights into Victorian landscapes of death

Chinese identities: official representations and new ethnicities

This thesis is a critique of official representations of Chinese identities, with particular reference to the City of Birmingham. The basis of the critique stems from a consideration of Stuart Hall’s new ethnicities thesis and follows the trajectory of his thesis to the ideas and methods surrounding deconstruction. Through unfolding this critique, the course of the thesis considers (a) the terms that delimit the emergence of Chinese identity in the local government archive and (b) a number of governmental propositions as well as their constitutive outside. The propositions that are decentred include: the Post World War II claims to the natural order of city life that I counter pose with the elision of immigration, a Chinese presence that is offered to the authenticate Birmingham’s Chinese Quarter that I counter pose through showing the regulative role of writing, a notion of community as a cohesive, uniform entity that I counter pose through showing the necessity of a co-existing state and, finally, the centring of a Chinese philanthropic entrepreneur that I counter pose by showing the borders of the City’s gift-giving. Despite the apparent fragmented nature of the above arguments, the research repeatedly encounters numerous claims to the sovereignty of Chinese identity. These claims run through and conjoin each chapter. However, the thesis also shows that such claims are partial thus marking a selective appropriation of cultural difference and the lack of a settled relationship between the Chinese population and the City of Birmingham. The thesis concludes with a discussion on the City’s hospitality

Return to work, work productivity loss and activity impairment in Chinese breast cancer survivors 12-month post-surgery: a longitudinal study

IntroductionExisting evidence of returning-to-work (RTW) after cancer comes predominately from Western settings, with none prospectively examined since the initial diagnostic phase. This study prospectively documents RTW-rate, time-to-RTW, work productivity loss, and activity impairment, within the first-year post-surgery among Chinese women with breast cancer (BCW) and identify potential causal co-variants.MethodsThis observational longitudinal study followed 371 Chinese BCW who were employed/self-employed at the time of diagnosis at 4-week post-surgery (baseline). RTW-status and time-to-RTW were assessed at baseline (T1), 4-month (T2), 6-month (T3), and 12-month (T4) post-baseline. WPAI work productivity loss and activity impairment were assessed at T4. Baseline covariates included demographics, medical-related factors, work satisfaction, perceived work demand, work condition, RTW self-efficacy, B-IPQ illness perception, COST financial well-being, EORTC QLQ-C30 and QLQ-BR23 physical and psychosocial functioning, and HADS psychological distress.ResultsA 68.2% RTW-rate (at 12-month post-surgery), prolonged delay in RTW (median = 183 days), and significant proportions of T4 work productivity loss (20%), and activity impairment (26%), were seen. BCW who were blue-collar workers with lower household income, poorer financial well-being, lower RTW self-efficacy, poorer job satisfaction, poorer illness perception, greater physical symptom distress, impaired physical functioning, and unfavorable work conditions were more likely to experience undesired work-related outcomes.DiscussionUsing a multifactorial approach, effective RTW interventions should focus on not only symptom management, but also to address psychosocial and work-environmental concerns. An organizational or policy level intervention involving a multidisciplinary team comprising nurses, psychologists, occupational health professionals, and relevant stakeholders in the workplace might be helpful in developing a tailored organizational policy promoting work-related outcomes in BCW

Mourning geography : a punctum, Strathclyde and the death of a subject

This article documents the formal consultation held at the University of Strathclyde in 2011 which concluded with a decision to withdraw the geography programme from the academic curriculum. In examining the remains of this consultation, the article offers an understanding of the reactions of staff and students to the proposed closure through the theoretical work on mourning by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. With use of the notions of punctum and studium in particular, it tracks the discursive location, if not definition, of what was and is poignant about geography at this higher education institution

A shared or multicultural future? Community cohesion and the (im)possibilities of hospitable social capital

Following the upheavals of 2001 in the northern England mill towns, there has been a renewed effort in policy circles to reconceptualise the terms of civic engagement between Britain's ethnic communities. Labelled 'community cohesion', the official agenda has drawn extensively from scholarly observations on social capital and, more recently, on an 'ethics of hospitality', to recommend a doctrine of social integration at a local scale. This paper suggests the ideals and ethos behind the development of such cohesion policies are incomplete and bear a productive contradiction, which promises an ethical reflection on the values at the intellectual core of New Labour's race relation policy

Escaping a grid by edge-disjoint paths

We study the edge-disjoint escape problem in grids. Given a set of n sources in a two-dimensional grid, the problem is to connect all sources to the grid boundary using a set of n edge-disjoint paths. Different from the conventional approach, which reduces the problem to a network flow problem, we solve the problem by first ensuring that no rectangle in the grid contain more sources than outlets, a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a solution. Based on this condition, we give a greedy algorithm that finds the paths in O(n 2) time, which is faster than all previous approaches. This problem finds applications in point-to-point delivery, VLSI reconfiguration, and package routing.

On-line Stream Merging with Max Span and Min Coverage

This paper introduces the notions of span and coverage for analyzing the performance of on-line algorithms for stream merging. It is shown that these two notions can solely determine the competitive ratio of any such algorithm. Furthermore, we devise a simple greedy algorithm that attains the ideal span and coverage, thus giving a better performance guarantee than existing algorithms. The new notions also allow us to obtain a tighter analysis of existing algorithms. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.postprin